In most urban settings, a sense of belonging is an important foundation for political participation. Political participation (also referred to as political engagement/mobilization) includes actions that are designed to express, claim, maintain, or expand individual and community justice, legitimacy, or power. And by belonging, I’m not simply talking about attachment, social connection, or loyalty, but about a deep feeling in which place and space are integral to personal identity and meaning.
These distinctions matter. While connection to a place can be instrumental, and loyalty may be strategic, belonging implies an affective and positive bond. Such attachment often affects/motivates a person’s desire and capacity to perceive and articulate grievances when a block, neighborhood, district, or city is threatened.
Admittedly, the causal relationship between belonging and political mobilization is not straightforward. In some cases, political engagement emerges from experiences of exclusion or displacement, where the absence of belonging generates claims to recognition and rights. Furthermore, belonging also operates unevenly across spatial areas. For example, what it means to belong to a block differs from what it means to be attached to a city, and how people respond in the political sphere may vary based on the attachment they feel for each different geographic entity.
These dynamics are also shaped in part by the quality and duration of social interactions. Sustained and positive encounters with neighbors, local workers, businesses, or community organizations tend to reinforce belonging, while recurrently negative or conflictual interactions (including criminal victimization) may erode it. Thus, belonging is not fixed but continually produced and contested in everyday urban life.
Expressions of belonging take multiple forms. Material practices such as home-making, memorialization, or the use of streets and public spaces can demonstrate attachment to place. Informal street-level symbolic markers often connected with street culture (e.g., graffiti, street art, etc.) may signal identification in visible ways. Institutional practices, such as branded signage, neighborhood newsletters, or city-sponsored campaigns, attempt to inscribe belonging into the urban landscape. Belonging can even manifest in less direct actions, for example, in the maintenance of civility, norms of cleanliness (e.g., cleaning the sidewalk in front of your residence or business), or everyday restraint (i.e., treating others with respect).
Although visible signs of identity can indicate attachment, they can also be performative or commodified branding detached from durable commitment.
In DC, where I live, belonging is demonstrated in lots of different ways, including displaying the DC flag on porches, murals, bumper stickers, clothing, and tattoos. Similarly, the 202 area code is placed on local clothing brands like District of Clothing, One Love Massive, and Made in the District that sell shirts, hats, and hoodies with neighborhood names (e.g., “Brookland,” “Petworth”). We also see slogans like “Don’t Mute DC” placed on this type of clothing. The “Taxation Without Representation” license plate encapsulates a widely shared grievance and serves as a civic identifier. DC has numerous neighborhood murals, paying homage to well-known homegrown musicians like jazz great Duke Ellington in Shaw to or the grandfather of Go-go, Chuck Brown. Bands often “rep” their neighborhood during performances. The “Don’t Mute DC” movement (2019) defended neighborhood cultural expression when Central Communications, a Metro PCS store in Shaw, was told to stop playing Go-go on speakers. Block parties, cookouts, and Go-go shows often double as neighborhood identity affirmations. Events like Adams Morgan Day or the H Street Festival showcase neighborhood pride while attracting visitors. Meanwhile, graffiti and street art may contain neighborhood names, abbreviations, or slang.
Yet markers of identity do not automatically translate into political action. Wearing a shirt with the name of the neighborhood on it or displaying a city flag does not guarantee that an individual will sign a petition, attend a protest, or join a boycott. The key issue is whether attachments to place channel grievances into collective political mobilization, and what kinds of actions are residents willing to engage in. Where belonging is absent, grievances may remain diffuse, limiting the scope for individuals and communities’ claims for justice, legitimacy, or claims to power.
All being said, belonging is a start.
Photo Credit
Title New York, New York. Children escape the heat of the East Side by using fire hydrant as a shower bath (1943).
Photographer: Smith, Roger
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2025-09-22-at-9.54.03-AM.png8621148Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-09-22 14:33:102025-09-26 17:31:01What’s the Role of Belonging in Urban Environments?
Parking, often treated as a mundane logistical concern, is an important site of contestation in urban life. At its core, it reflects the struggle over public space in cities, where demand routinely exceeds supply.
Although debates about cars usually focus on externalities like emissions or their dominance over other modes of urban mobility, vehicles need to be stored, and drivers who use their vehicles in a city expect space to be available. Yet such spaces are typically scarce and therefore valuable. Municipalities attempt to impose order (and generate revenue) through ordinances, signage, enforcement, and fines, which reflect broader priorities about whose mobility matters.
Parking regulation, then, is more than bureaucratic management; it is an exercise of state power that structures everyday mobility and privileges certain users (e.g., residents, commuters, or commercial actors) over others in certain spaces, during particular times.
But urban order does not flow only from law. Informal norms shape behavior: whether a departing driver “owes” a space to someone waiting, how long it is acceptable to double-park, or whether putting a chair in a snow-cleared space is legitimate. Such practices reveal how everyday interactions generate micro-negotiations (and aggressions) of entitlement and authority. They demonstrate that order is continually produced and contested at the street level, not simply imposed from above.
Conflicts over towing, double-parking, or “space-saving” further highlight how residents and drivers attempt to assert claims over scarce resources, sometimes in defiance of official rules. These disputes expose tensions between formal regulation and lived practice, linking the politics of parking to broader questions of urban justice, governance, and the “right to the city.” The questions over who gets access to public space, what types of space, under what conditions, and under what terms are dominant in this exercise.
Ultimately, parking is not a mundane logistical issue but a microcosm of broader urban struggles over the distribution of rights, the allocation of resources, and the contestation of urban space itself.
Photo credit:
Title: Improptu Parking Sign Washington, D.C.
Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_5130-scaled.jpg19202560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-09-14 12:22:062025-09-14 12:43:38Parking as a Microcosm of Broader Urban Struggles
A little over two weeks ago, Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old paralegal, who has since been fired from the United States Department of Justice, hurled a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent on 14th Street in Washington, D.C.
The video of the incident spread quickly, and media coverage followed a predictable script: playful headlines, a few amusing commentaries, and a burst of memes that quickly circulated before the story faded out of the news cycle. The most striking cultural echo was a reworking of Banksy’s iconic street art piece, “Flower Thrower,” in which the protester was depicted hurling a sandwich instead of a bouquet.
But this framing misses a handful of important things.
Protest or Drunken Outburst?
At first glance, the episode appears to be nothing more than a drunken outburst. Dunn wasn’t leading a march, chanting slogans, and didn’t appear to be making a political statement. He seemed to be irritated and impulsive. From this angle, it’s understandable why the media framed the act as unserious.
Yet protest has always contained humorous and provocative elements. Think back to when activists cream-pied self-righteous politicians, business leaders, or cultural figures seen as hypocritical, powerful, or controversial. These acts mocked those in positions of power and knocked them off their pedestal just a tad. In this context, a pie in the face was never “just dessert.” It was symbolic resistance.
However, the sandwich event occupies an ambiguous space. On the one hand, it lacks the intentionality of satire. On the other hand, the state’s reaction has forced us to confront how fragile our current criminal justice system perceives itself to be when even a soggy hoagie is treated as a threat.
The Criminalization of Trivial Acts
Not only was Dunn arrested, but former Fox News host and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, suggested in a provocative video that Dunn would be charged with felony assault.
But law enforcement officers, especially those tasked with protest control, are trained to withstand far more than a flying sandwich. They routinely face bottles, eggs, and even rocks during demonstrations. To act as though a sandwich constitutes a serious projectile stretches credibility and makes cops (whether at the local or federal level) out to be whimps and the criminal justice system a joke.
More specifically, when the law treats a sandwich as a weapon, it elevates police fragility above common sense. This is not about public safety; it is about guarding the aura of authority. And the fact that federal prosecutors could not persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment means that the public is not buying any of this shit.
Media as Purveyors of Comic Relief
Back to the mainstream media. For its part, it chose the easy path: novelty and cuteness. A subway sandwich thrown at a cop? Perfect fodder for quippy headlines and viral sharing. It was framed as “cute,” an absurd blip in the daily churn. This trivialization also temporarily relieved the public of the burden of thinking about immigration enforcement overreach, protest policing, or the criminalization of minor acts. And it temporarily legitimized the charges by treating them as natural consequences of normal policing.
Why It Matters
We live in a time when public protest is increasingly criminalized. From bans on certain demonstrations to aggressive policing of even minor disruptions, the threshold for “threat” has sunk lower and lower. Why, just this week, a woman was arrested for spitting at a cop, and Pirro is also considering charging that person with felony assault.
It matters how we respond. In earlier eras, a pie in a politician’s face was understood as political theater, however unserious. It was disruptive, yes, but it was also a critique. Today, when every minor gesture can be weaponized and turned into a spectacle in the media, even the possibility of playful dissent is being squeezed out.
The Real Question
So, what is the proper takeaway from the sandwich thrower incident and how people and institutions responded to it?
Dean’s action wasn’t a profound act of resistance.
And he does not deserve the designation of hero (despite the pun that tempts us to call him one).
Then again, we shouldn’t accept the popular narrative that Dean’s actions were meaningless. The episode shows how, during the Trump administration, the courts quickly want to criminalize minor acts, and how eagerly the press frames the acts as comical.
Meanwhile, neither entities act as if nothing bigger is at stake.
Until we grapple with these complementary issues, the next thrown sandwich, egg, or pie will be treated not as satire, not as politics, but as crime. And that should trouble us the most.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2025-08-30-at-8.32.59-AM.png458978Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-08-31 12:40:572025-10-19 17:44:44Rethinking the Subway Sandwich Guy Incident
What’s the Role of Belonging in Urban Environments?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIn most urban settings, a sense of belonging is an important foundation for political participation. Political participation (also referred to as political engagement/mobilization) includes actions that are designed to express, claim, maintain, or expand individual and community justice, legitimacy, or power. And by belonging, I’m not simply talking about attachment, social connection, or loyalty, but about a deep feeling in which place and space are integral to personal identity and meaning.
These distinctions matter. While connection to a place can be instrumental, and loyalty may be strategic, belonging implies an affective and positive bond. Such attachment often affects/motivates a person’s desire and capacity to perceive and articulate grievances when a block, neighborhood, district, or city is threatened.
Admittedly, the causal relationship between belonging and political mobilization is not straightforward. In some cases, political engagement emerges from experiences of exclusion or displacement, where the absence of belonging generates claims to recognition and rights. Furthermore, belonging also operates unevenly across spatial areas. For example, what it means to belong to a block differs from what it means to be attached to a city, and how people respond in the political sphere may vary based on the attachment they feel for each different geographic entity.
These dynamics are also shaped in part by the quality and duration of social interactions. Sustained and positive encounters with neighbors, local workers, businesses, or community organizations tend to reinforce belonging, while recurrently negative or conflictual interactions (including criminal victimization) may erode it. Thus, belonging is not fixed but continually produced and contested in everyday urban life.
Expressions of belonging take multiple forms. Material practices such as home-making, memorialization, or the use of streets and public spaces can demonstrate attachment to place. Informal street-level symbolic markers often connected with street culture (e.g., graffiti, street art, etc.) may signal identification in visible ways. Institutional practices, such as branded signage, neighborhood newsletters, or city-sponsored campaigns, attempt to inscribe belonging into the urban landscape. Belonging can even manifest in less direct actions, for example, in the maintenance of civility, norms of cleanliness (e.g., cleaning the sidewalk in front of your residence or business), or everyday restraint (i.e., treating others with respect).
Although visible signs of identity can indicate attachment, they can also be performative or commodified branding detached from durable commitment.
In DC, where I live, belonging is demonstrated in lots of different ways, including displaying the DC flag on porches, murals, bumper stickers, clothing, and tattoos. Similarly, the 202 area code is placed on local clothing brands like District of Clothing, One Love Massive, and Made in the District that sell shirts, hats, and hoodies with neighborhood names (e.g., “Brookland,” “Petworth”). We also see slogans like “Don’t Mute DC” placed on this type of clothing. The “Taxation Without Representation” license plate encapsulates a widely shared grievance and serves as a civic identifier. DC has numerous neighborhood murals, paying homage to well-known homegrown musicians like jazz great Duke Ellington in Shaw to or the grandfather of Go-go, Chuck Brown. Bands often “rep” their neighborhood during performances. The “Don’t Mute DC” movement (2019) defended neighborhood cultural expression when Central Communications, a Metro PCS store in Shaw, was told to stop playing Go-go on speakers. Block parties, cookouts, and Go-go shows often double as neighborhood identity affirmations. Events like Adams Morgan Day or the H Street Festival showcase neighborhood pride while attracting visitors. Meanwhile, graffiti and street art may contain neighborhood names, abbreviations, or slang.
Yet markers of identity do not automatically translate into political action. Wearing a shirt with the name of the neighborhood on it or displaying a city flag does not guarantee that an individual will sign a petition, attend a protest, or join a boycott. The key issue is whether attachments to place channel grievances into collective political mobilization, and what kinds of actions are residents willing to engage in. Where belonging is absent, grievances may remain diffuse, limiting the scope for individuals and communities’ claims for justice, legitimacy, or claims to power.
All being said, belonging is a start.
Photo Credit
Title New York, New York. Children escape the heat of the East Side by using fire hydrant as a shower bath (1943).
Photographer: Smith, Roger
Parking as a Microcosm of Broader Urban Struggles
/by Jeffrey Ian RossParking, often treated as a mundane logistical concern, is an important site of contestation in urban life. At its core, it reflects the struggle over public space in cities, where demand routinely exceeds supply.
Although debates about cars usually focus on externalities like emissions or their dominance over other modes of urban mobility, vehicles need to be stored, and drivers who use their vehicles in a city expect space to be available. Yet such spaces are typically scarce and therefore valuable. Municipalities attempt to impose order (and generate revenue) through ordinances, signage, enforcement, and fines, which reflect broader priorities about whose mobility matters.
Parking regulation, then, is more than bureaucratic management; it is an exercise of state power that structures everyday mobility and privileges certain users (e.g., residents, commuters, or commercial actors) over others in certain spaces, during particular times.
But urban order does not flow only from law. Informal norms shape behavior: whether a departing driver “owes” a space to someone waiting, how long it is acceptable to double-park, or whether putting a chair in a snow-cleared space is legitimate. Such practices reveal how everyday interactions generate micro-negotiations (and aggressions) of entitlement and authority. They demonstrate that order is continually produced and contested at the street level, not simply imposed from above.
Conflicts over towing, double-parking, or “space-saving” further highlight how residents and drivers attempt to assert claims over scarce resources, sometimes in defiance of official rules. These disputes expose tensions between formal regulation and lived practice, linking the politics of parking to broader questions of urban justice, governance, and the “right to the city.” The questions over who gets access to public space, what types of space, under what conditions, and under what terms are dominant in this exercise.
Ultimately, parking is not a mundane logistical issue but a microcosm of broader urban struggles over the distribution of rights, the allocation of resources, and the contestation of urban space itself.
Photo credit:
Title: Improptu Parking Sign Washington, D.C.
Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.
Rethinking the Subway Sandwich Guy Incident
/by Jeffrey Ian RossA little over two weeks ago, Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old paralegal, who has since been fired from the United States Department of Justice, hurled a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent on 14th Street in Washington, D.C.
The video of the incident spread quickly, and media coverage followed a predictable script: playful headlines, a few amusing commentaries, and a burst of memes that quickly circulated before the story faded out of the news cycle. The most striking cultural echo was a reworking of Banksy’s iconic street art piece, “Flower Thrower,” in which the protester was depicted hurling a sandwich instead of a bouquet.
But this framing misses a handful of important things.
Protest or Drunken Outburst?
At first glance, the episode appears to be nothing more than a drunken outburst. Dunn wasn’t leading a march, chanting slogans, and didn’t appear to be making a political statement. He seemed to be irritated and impulsive. From this angle, it’s understandable why the media framed the act as unserious.
Yet protest has always contained humorous and provocative elements. Think back to when activists cream-pied self-righteous politicians, business leaders, or cultural figures seen as hypocritical, powerful, or controversial. These acts mocked those in positions of power and knocked them off their pedestal just a tad. In this context, a pie in the face was never “just dessert.” It was symbolic resistance.
However, the sandwich event occupies an ambiguous space. On the one hand, it lacks the intentionality of satire. On the other hand, the state’s reaction has forced us to confront how fragile our current criminal justice system perceives itself to be when even a soggy hoagie is treated as a threat.
The Criminalization of Trivial Acts
Not only was Dunn arrested, but former Fox News host and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, suggested in a provocative video that Dunn would be charged with felony assault.
But law enforcement officers, especially those tasked with protest control, are trained to withstand far more than a flying sandwich. They routinely face bottles, eggs, and even rocks during demonstrations. To act as though a sandwich constitutes a serious projectile stretches credibility and makes cops (whether at the local or federal level) out to be whimps and the criminal justice system a joke.
More specifically, when the law treats a sandwich as a weapon, it elevates police fragility above common sense. This is not about public safety; it is about guarding the aura of authority. And the fact that federal prosecutors could not persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment means that the public is not buying any of this shit.
Media as Purveyors of Comic Relief
Back to the mainstream media. For its part, it chose the easy path: novelty and cuteness. A subway sandwich thrown at a cop? Perfect fodder for quippy headlines and viral sharing. It was framed as “cute,” an absurd blip in the daily churn. This trivialization also temporarily relieved the public of the burden of thinking about immigration enforcement overreach, protest policing, or the criminalization of minor acts. And it temporarily legitimized the charges by treating them as natural consequences of normal policing.
Why It Matters
We live in a time when public protest is increasingly criminalized. From bans on certain demonstrations to aggressive policing of even minor disruptions, the threshold for “threat” has sunk lower and lower. Why, just this week, a woman was arrested for spitting at a cop, and Pirro is also considering charging that person with felony assault.
It matters how we respond. In earlier eras, a pie in a politician’s face was understood as political theater, however unserious. It was disruptive, yes, but it was also a critique. Today, when every minor gesture can be weaponized and turned into a spectacle in the media, even the possibility of playful dissent is being squeezed out.
The Real Question
So, what is the proper takeaway from the sandwich thrower incident and how people and institutions responded to it?
Although it prompted some protesters to construct placards emblazoned with pithy slogans, and others to create and sell novelty t-shirts, we’ve yet to see a barrage of anti-ICE protesters arming themselves with subway sandwiches.
Dean’s action wasn’t a profound act of resistance.
And he does not deserve the designation of hero (despite the pun that tempts us to call him one).
Then again, we shouldn’t accept the popular narrative that Dean’s actions were meaningless. The episode shows how, during the Trump administration, the courts quickly want to criminalize minor acts, and how eagerly the press frames the acts as comical.
Meanwhile, neither entities act as if nothing bigger is at stake.
Until we grapple with these complementary issues, the next thrown sandwich, egg, or pie will be treated not as satire, not as politics, but as crime. And that should trouble us the most.